Erin Brown

It was instead this idea that humanity could, in fact, resurrect everyone who had ever lived and achieve immortality for those who are living now.

And that we could all live together, both on the earth and in worlds beyond.

So he has these ideas that take the kinds of energy and fervor that we were seeing in the French Revolution and taking them one step further, right?

The French Revolution is all about like liberty and equality and brotherhood.

And he says, we don't need liberty and equality if we have actual brotherhood, if we're actually taking care of one another.

And he had this idea that at that moment, basically all of the technology of the world was being used for warfare, right?

Anytime there was a leap forward in anything from like sewing to chemistry, governments were using this to find new ways to wage war.

And he said, instead, what if we took, right, what if we took all of these efforts and all of this energy and turned it instead towards this task of trying to figure out how to cheat death?

Every philosophy in the world sort of accepts death as an ineffable.

And he instead was like, I don't think I can accept that.

I think there has to be a way that we can overcome this and that we can not only live forever, but we can resurrect our ancestors and live with them.

Yeah.

Now, of course, there was a problem with this, which is if you're resurrecting everyone who's ever lived, you're going to be living in like a sardine tin on the planet Earth.

And so one of the things that Fyodorov was thinking about was how do we get off of the planet Earth and start populating other parts of the solar system so that everybody has enough space to live and live well?

Yeah, so he eventually moved to Moscow and he got a job at what's essentially the Russian State Library.

And he was the worst writer.

You cannot read his writings.

In Russian, in translation, it is turgid, it is dry.

But he became essentially kind of the Socrates of Moscow.

And he had a little group of acolytes who would listen to his ideas and then translate them to other people, either orally or write them down.